Monday, 7 June 2010

"Real Gamer Girl" Reviews Tomes of the Dead

Hi all,

Bit of a backstory to this one. A young lady from over the pond called "Zephri" (real name Cassie) somehow managed to get the attention of a couple of gaming websites called Bell of Lost Souls and Chainfist, who breathlessly reported the existence of an actual girl who plays games, and interviewed her for the sites. You can read the interview starting here.

Now you may well be thinking "so what?" and I gather Cassie would agree with you. We're not quite sure why this was considered as desperately newsworthy as all that, but it did manage to get her blog a massive boost in readership and a flurry of comments, and made her that most fleeting of things, an internet celebrity.

Anyway.

I come into this when trawling the internet for zombies (professionally, of course; I love my job) and I trip over Cassie's post "I ♥ Zombies," in which she tells of her disappointment upon reading a zombie romance anthology (from a rival publisher, natch), professes her deep passion for the zombie genre and complains at the lack of good genre fic.

What ho, think I, we've done a zombie romance novel and it was brilliant. I bet she'd enjoy that. And I start drafting a comment on her blog nudging her in our website's direction, when I see how many comments she's getting and read her subsequent post about her newfound fame. So I figure she's an opinion-former now and send her comps of four of our zombie books.

Anyway, that was a few months back and I gather she's been very busy and has had a computer failure to boot, but she's finally posted this review for us, sharing her thoughts on Gary McMahon's Hungry Hearts ("this book gives you everything you'd expect from a zombie romance novel and then some") and Al Ewing's I, Zombie ("I can't really describe this book without "WTF?!").

But I particularly wanted to share this quote:

"[I, Zombie] gives you a seemingly simple concept, a sentient zombie that works as a mercenary/detective, but that concept is but the candle on top of a giant cake that secretly holds a really hot stripper, and she jumps out with the keys to a Ferrari then you all go out for ice cream and puppies. Then your head explodes."

By an astonishing coincidence, that actually happened to Al once. Tragically the puppies tasted dreadful and the ice cream melted in its basket.